Impact of increased demand for pole-and-line caught tuna

The Promotion of Pole-and-Line Tuna Fishing in the Pacific Islands: Emerging Issues and Lessons Learned examines “issues associated with promoting pole-and-line fishing and attempts to derive lessons from experience that may guide future development efforts.”

Among the study’s findings:

• The major pole-and-line producers are Japan (about 125,000t of skipjack and yellowfin annually), Indonesia (100,000t), and the Maldives (100,000 ). The world’s production is about 400,000t annually, some of which is for domestic consumption. There are between 100,000 and 150,000t of pole-and-line caught skipjack and yellowfin on the international market.
• In the Pacific Islands the availability of bait, rather than tuna, has often been the resource factor limiting expansion of a pole-and-line tuna fishery. The main lessons from extensive baitfish work in the late 1970s is that the large islands in the west of the Pacific Island region have the best potential for bait-fisheries for pole-and-line fishing. Small islands in the east and atolls have the least potential.
• Information from a company in the Solomon Islands shows high production costs and low productivity of pole-and-line fishing relative to that of purse seining. Historical information from pole-and-line fishing in PNG shows that the real price of tuna today is less than half the price of what it was during the height of the fishery 30 years ago.
• The main lesson appears to be that the pole-and-line development or revitalisation in the region is a very difficult task and certainly not as easy as stated in some of the NGO promotional literature. Experience from other regions seems to indicate that the Pacific Islands is not the only region struggling to succeed in pole-and-line promotion.

The entire report can be downloaded here.